Tonight is the night of the Persied Meteor Shower. It brings back a memory.

I think I may have told this story here before, and if I have, and if you happened to have read it and even more remarkably remember it, please forgive.

(NSFW topic wise, but nothing too explicit.)

One night long, long ago, at least twenty years ago, when Dear Wife and I were in very physically close husband-wife proximity, I told her of a hot woman I had seen that day, how excited she had made me. And Dear Wife sweetly responded, "If the situation ever comes up and you see a woman and you have to have her, you just must have her, go ahead and have her, on me. That's my gift to you."

So a few years later, I did.

Her name was Pascale, she was French, from Paris; I met her when she was a desk clerk at a hotel in Silicon Valley where I used to stay often. I was 40, she was 26. She was a nursing student making a few bucks working the late shift.

Those of you who have read my famous novel Acts of the Apostles know that there appears in it a hot French chick named Pascale. A lot of the Pascale parts of Acts of the Apostles are taken from "real life", for example, our visit to gay bar in San Jose late one night and our game of "Liar's Poker" there, and the part about how I (a very conflicted married man intent on not having sex with her) went into Pascale's rented house with her at 2:30 AM only because I had to pee so bad I was about to burst, and about how, when I attempted to leave & go back to my hotel she threatened to scream "RAPE" if I didn't fuck her, and in fact did scream that word, loud, until I consented to her request, which wasn't hard to manage despite my blood-alcohol level, for she was pretty damn hot, I'm not kidding.

See "Acts" for more on that topic.

That first encounter with Pascale was in the early summer of 1993, when I was a bi-coastal manager for Sun Microsystems & traveling frequently from my home in Massachusetts, where I had a wife, an 11 year old daughter, a nine year old son and an a four year old daughter. About that time Sun told me that I had to move to California & piled on the work, and I started spending a lot of time there, as my wife at home took care of the children and managed the packing up the house (which Sun paid for, back in the days when money was for nothing).

Luckily for me, Pascale stopped working at my favorite hotel (Woodfin Suites). She never said so, but I think she got fired because she was witnessed entering a hotel guest's room (mine) on the second day of our initial two-day affair.

Because I didn't want things to get out of control, I didn't tell Pascale that I was living by myself in a hotel room most of that summer, waiting for my family to move west & join me in the house I had arranged to rent in Fremont. So far as she knew, I was just some hotel guest from the East Coast with whom she had had a short fling. She knew my name, and that I was married and that I worked at Sun. She thought I was back in Massachusetts, thousands of miles away.

She didn't know that for most of that summer I was staying half a mile from her house, and that I used to drive by it often, in my rental car, slowly, resisting the urge to pull into the driveway & pick up where we had left off.

So my family's move from Massachusetts to California was arranged. After much looking and much investigation of neighborhoods and schools (by me) and checking of the checking account, we signed a lease on a house in Fremont.

We couldn't buy a house because my wife's business had gone bust and taken our life savings with it. Even if Dear Wife's business had not gone bust we could not have afforded to buy a house there, such was the disparity between inflated California prices and depressed Massachusetts prices. So, we were renters. Which was good and bad, but a topic for another day.

So anyway, the eve of the day comes, the day on which my wife and three young children are to arrive in California from Massachusetts, by areoplane. I've spent most of the summer living in a hotel room in Sunnyvale, going to work at Sun in Mountain View, missing by wife and children but horny as hell for Pascale, whom I'm avoiding by sheer force of will.

Dear Wife's & my worldly goods are in a moving van making its way across the country. My family will be here so soon! I am bursting with joy and anticipation!

But on my last free night before they are to arrive, lust and curiosity and whatever overcome me, and I go and knock on Pascale's door, at about 8:00PM. It is the night of the Persiod Meteor Shower.

Pascale is there at home, & she has a girlfriend with her. I ask her to come with me up into the high hills (low mountains) beyond San Jose, to watch the meteor shower with me.

Pascale comes to the door. Pushes me outside with both hands. Closes the door behind us. Embraces me. Kisses me violently. "You must go away. I cannot talk now. Go away. Come see me again." I tell her my wife and family are coming, arriving the next day, I will probably never see her again. I should not have come by. I apologize. "Go now!" she says. She slams the door in my face.

I go back to the hotel, relieved that I have not cheated on my wife again. I tell myself that I have never really really "cheated," since I have the virtual "get out of jail free" card that my wife gave me. If you just have to have her, then have her Dear Wife said. And boy, did I ever have to have Pascale. So I had her. But I also know that with Pascale, I'm cheating. The attraction between us is just too strong to pretend otherwise. I'm very close to playing with fire.

I consider going up into the hills to watch the meteor shower away from light pollution, but that's a long way away, it's late, and I have a big day tomorrow. My family is coming! At last! I need my sleep.

At 2:30 AM my hotel room phone rings (youngsters: cell phones were long in the future).

It's Pascale. She explains that she had a guy with her when I came by, a guy who expected to spend the night with her. That was why she pushed me out the front door & told me to go away (after putting her tongue down my throat). She has gotten rid of him, she says. Can she come get me?

But we both realize it's too late. Too late for us to drive up into the hills to watch the meteor shower, too late for us to have one last "go".

We chatted for half an hour in French and English; maybe an hour. Seldom in my life have I felt so desired.

Then we said goodbye.

Only the next morning did I realize that when I went by her house I had not told Pascale where I was staying--at a hotel ten miles from the place where she and I had met. And yes, as I later found out from her, she had called every hotel in Silicon Valley, at least fifteen of them, until she found me.

After my family moved to California the whole idea of my seeing Pascale became more dishonest, less fun, more dangerous. She sent to me at my office an essay that had been printed in Time Magazine, of all places, about how the French in particular and Europeans in general were so much more adult than Americans about the whole idea of "the affair". Pascale understood, she said, that I was a married man who loved his wife and who had three children. But come on, she said, we're adults. You and I really enjoy each other's company, and we really like having sex together! Stop being an American prude! Let me be your mistress.

It was tempting. So, so, so tempting. But I said no, because I knew that the kind of affair Pascale was suggesting was way beyond the bounds of the "get out of jail free" card that Dear Wife had given me. For me to have a full-on affair with Pascale would have been a breaking of the deal, a betrayal.

So Pascale and I went out for lunch a few times; she would drive to the Sun campus and pick me up in her little Volkswagen convertible and we would go out to a cheapo place in Mountain View or Sunnyvale & have coffee & pastry. Once, we scurried back to her house & had sex. But it was not good sex. Before, that first 2-day fling, our sex had been volcanic. Later? Let's not talk about it. It was "meh".

Pascale told me about her new boyfriends, which made me happy. I liked the idea of her having boyfriends her own age, and she had several.

But there was a problem. She didn't like them as much as she liked me, she said. They were young and crude and boring. She preferred my company.

Which made me point out my wedding ring, my balding head, the pictures of children in my wallet, and our age difference.

"You and me, it cannot work;" I said. "This is the USA, not France. It cannot work. I'll be your older brother and your friend, but I'll never have sex with you again. Never. Because the risks are too great that I'll fuck up the greatest thing a guy could have."

And I never did have sex with her again. We had coffee together perhaps ten times over the next ten months. We exchanged emails -- mostly about literature and ideas, if I remember right. But in fact I don't remember much about our emails. I remember bits of our conversations, and her face, and her scary self-possession and her breasts. I remember some jokes. But I've forgotten a lot. I do believe that she became comfortable with the idea of me as older confidant rather than as lover.

Then Son, age 10, got very, very ill and nearly died. Emergency brain surgery to save his life. It so happened that Pascale and I had had a coffee date for that morning, the morning of Son's 6:00 AM emergency brain sugery. I called Pascale from a pay phone at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, while my son was in surgery and my wife was pondering funeral arrangements if he didn't make it & making calls to the family.

"This is the end," I told Pascale from the pay phone. "Any further contact between me and you would be immoral. You are young, smart, and beautiful. Go have fun. But never contact me again, and I will never contact you. This is the end." That was our last communication, in early spring, 1994.

Several years later, I told Dear Wife the whole Pascale story. She was a bit pissed at first, but she did admit that I had acted with her prior blessing, and she commended me on my good taste. Eventually she came to kind of delight in the sorry as a point of pride -- for her gift was, in fact, truly awesome.

For years after that, whenever Dear Wife asked me what I wanted for a birthday, Christmas or anniversary present, I always said, "I want another get out of jail free card," and she always said "keep dreaming, shit-for-brains."

Then about five years ago I opened an envelope that Dear Wife gave me for my birthday. In it: a monopoly card, "Get out of Jail Free". Dear Wife said, "just don't bring me any diseases."

What happened to that card is a story for another day.

So anyway, I consider myself a monogamist. But like they say in the baseball record books, with an asterisk.

Tonight is the Persied Meteor Shower. I'm going to go have a cigar and look up at the sky and think about Pascale and Dear Wife and the nature of time and love and promises.

Many people have done many kind things to me that have made me feel loved and wanted. But I must tell you: when I was 40 years old, a hot, smart French chick ditched her date and then spent the next several hours calling every hotel in Silicon Valley until she found me, just so we could talk on the phone. It may be the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me. What a sweet, special memory.

Pascale also convinced me to write my first novel, Acts of the Apostles. I told her that I wanted to write this book, but that I needed to provide for my family, so would probably never have time to do it. "And if you don't write it?" she said in her glorious Parisienne French. "Then your wife's husband will be an empty, boring, bitter shell who thinks he could have been a writer. So write the novel for her, whether she wants you to or not. You fool."

Years ago Dear Wife told me I should tell this story on HuSi. "Ah, well," I said. "Some people will like it and other people will just think it's more bullshit, and HuSi is hanging on by a slender enough thread already; I don't want to add more bullshit to its burden."

But it's a story worth telling, I think. In any event, now it's told, at least provisionally.

Pascale, wherever you are, thank you. You made me feel sexy; you made me feel smart; you made me feel that I could & should and had a moral obligation to write novels, which I have since done.

I'm going to go outside now and light up a cigar and wait for the Persied meteors to arrive.

This is not a moral comment or on morality by yankeehack (4.00 / 3) #1Fri Aug 13, 2010 at 01:53:43 AM EST

So take it for what it is...

I just hold the idea that I would be the desired one my partner would want.

If I wasn't then I shouldn't be their partner...unless I couldn't fulfill it. "...she dares to indulge in the secret sport. You can't be a MILF with the F, at least in part because the M is predicated upon it."-CBB

I could eat steak for the rest of my life by BadDoggie (4.00 / 4) #4Fri Aug 13, 2010 at 07:25:59 AM EST

Doesn't mean I don't like lobster and wouldn't consider it, and it wouldn't change my taste for steak.

In all diaries like this you post in a way that seems like you expect that The One will never, ever notice another woman out there. That just ain't how humans work. Johnny's wife is clearly secure enough with their relationship that she even gave him a second get-out-of-jail-free card. Sex is sex, love is love -- there are parts of that Venn diagram which don't necessarily overlap.

I understand this on a finer point than you think I do - which is what prompted me to reflect on what johnny wrote last night.

I get that sex does not equal love and that it doesn't necessarily mean a relationship. It can be mindblowlingly great or it can be chapped, sore and mundane. Or in between.

Sex is easy. Sex is easy to get if you've been single for a while. Maybe that is why I am not motivated by it, but the time before, after and in between is more important to me. "...she dares to indulge in the secret sport. You can't be a MILF with the F, at least in part because the M is predicated upon it."-CBB

What does length of singleness have to do with it? by houser2112 (2.00 / 0) #20Fri Aug 13, 2010 at 11:34:47 AM EST

AFAICT, it should be "Sex is easy to get if you're a woman". Men tend to be less picky than women. If a woman is not getting as much as she would like, she's either too picky or not aggressive enough. I would say that, controlling attractiveness and aggressiveness, women get more than men.

Do people looking for just a hookup really care how long (or IF, even) a potential partner has been single?

only really matters in terms of numbers of people I could (if I wanted) call up for a booty call or go on a date with a happy ending."...she dares to indulge in the secret sport. You can't be a MILF with the F, at least in part because the M is predicated upon it."-CBB

I don't think most of them would care, and some of them would even prefer if it if I was not 'single'.

It's just that there IS a pool of potentials, that's all I was pointing out..."...she dares to indulge in the secret sport. You can't be a MILF with the F, at least in part because the M is predicated upon it."-CBB

Monogamy is, for humans and most other creatures, really difficult. Better I think to acknowledge that it's difficult and -- in some cases -- impossible, than to have any outside contact destroy what is otherwise a strong and loving relationship. For myself, I know that I would find a truly open relationship difficult if not impossible, but I certainly wouldn't expect a relationship of any appreciable length to be monogamous for its entire life.--
The amount of suck that you can put up with can be mind-boggling, but it only really hits you when it then ceases to suck. -- Kellnerin

seems to work, although I don't know anything about it other than that it's a perennial topic at SF conventions. I know an "open" relationship wouldn't work for me and Dear Wife; it fact it was, among other things, her first husband's incessant philandering that ended that marriage and allowed me & Dear Wife to find each other.

So we don't have an "open marriage". Dear Wife is the one for me; we're coming up on our 30th anniversary next month. I do consider ours a monogamous relationship -- but as I said, with an asterisk in the record books.

She has effectively checked out. She's an un-person of her own making. So it falls to me.--ad hoc (in the hole)

I once accidentally listened to Gordon Liddy, that felonious windbag, making the same point. He didn't like the term "bloodmobile" among others. It should be sanguinemobile or bloodwagon he said.

I think he was about to launch a national campaign against use of the word "television".

Meanwhile if the polyamorists want to say polyamory, I'm not going to stop them. (I'm also not going to attend any of their "Introduction to the Poly Lifestyle" sessions at the Arisia SF convention. I think I can let my imagination handle that for me, thank you very much.)

She has effectively checked out. She's an un-person of her own making. So it falls to me.--ad hoc (in the hole)

horrible, but Liddy is much more horrible. He has, or at one time had, a radio show that was broadcast on WXTK on Cape Cod, which is also the station that broadcasts Red Sox games. So sometimes I get in the car and the radio's on that station because I had been listening to the game the night before. I have listened to Liddy for stretches of up to ten minutes before waking up and changing the station or turning the damn thing off.

His "sanguinemobile" bit was particularly memorable. It seemed to demonstrate to the people calling into his show just what an erudite guy he was.

I do apologize to all humanity for having listened to hi for those ten minutes. Sorry, won't happen again.

She has effectively checked out. She's an un-person of her own making. So it falls to me.--ad hoc (in the hole)

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